Guilty Until Proven Innocent Casual blood libel in your local paper. By Nellie Bowles
The blood libel heard ’round the world: So let us get this straight: terrorists burst across the border of Israel, slaughtered innocents, raped women, took captives—including toddlers who remain in their hands—then accidentally exploded a rocket in their own Gaza hospital parking lot, and somehow, in all of this, Israel is still the bad guy.
Let’s start with the rocket. As soon as it went off, Hamas blamed Israel, which in turn said it needed a minute to verify what happened. Do you know who doesn’t need a minute? The mainstream American press. Reuters, The Washington Post, and The New York Times blindly ran with the Hamas account: an Israeli strike, a hospital, hundreds of deaths—500, according to the Times. (A great collection of those headlines can be found here.) The Times even ran an image of a blown-up building—but it wasn’t the hospital. The news ricocheted around the world, leading to attacks on synagogues and marches on embassies. It is the dominant narrative now and likely forever. Even though it is a lie. In the information war, this was a spectacular win for Hamas.
After Biden announced that U.S. intelligence confirmed the Israeli government account—it was a failed rocket from within Gaza—there were no apologies, no corrections, just subtle headline changes to make it slightly factual-ish. (Just compare this to the uproar after Tom Cotton’s op-ed, which led to the firing of the paper’s opinion editor.) And so it was a bit of an awakening for me. This is the week I realized that the adults I thought were flawed but trying are actually on meth and don’t care. Or maybe it’s even worse: they know it’s a lie.
Of note: one of the NYT reporters doing the liveblog on the Israel-Hamas war was an intern for Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. And Rashida? Even after the facts came out and her own government said the bomb was Hamas’s, Rashida was leading a rally, citing the much too useful blood libel: “I continue to watch people think it’s okay to bomb a hospital with children.”
The main stance in U.S. media is that Hamas rockets are so delicate and sweet they could never kill so many people. Here’s Karen Attiah of The Washington Post:
I love the high-minded tone we’re getting so often these days: “Fellow journalists, do your jobs.” What, in your mind, is my job?
→ We may have been slightly too eager: The BBC on Thursday issued a statement that it was “wrong to speculate”—er, more or less announce—that Israel was behind the hospital explosion. It’s mushy and awkward, but at least the BBC acknowledges it wasn’t at its finest.
This was the closest things came to an apology in the American media:
Translation: covering war is so hard, be nice, Hamas lied to us 🙁
→ Prove to me that you’re not guilty, sir: Here is a Los Angeles Times investigations editor saying that when it comes to the Jewish state, the burden is on them to prove they didn’t do. . . anything he says they did:
The Jews are guilty until they prove their innocence, but all evidence that they and the U.S. government present is fake, so we return to our previous assessment: the Jews are guilty. His boss won’t give him any trouble, though, for this bulletproof logic.
The Los Angeles Times managing editor Sara Yasin is busy posting stories about how Israel is committing “genocide,” and promoting the idea that documents showing Hamas targeted Israeli civilians could be fake.
Yes, the new line you’ll see is that Hamas didn’t intend to kill any civilians at all. And my gosh, I think that’s right: Hamas crossed the border to bring everyone bagels! Then they ran into some super-aggro grandmas and dancing youth who literally fell on Hamas guns (have they heard of consent?), and all these annoying toddlers insisted on coming back to Gaza. Do I have it right?
→ Why do you want those babies back anyway? What are you implying by saying you don’t want your children kidnapped? And now you want them back? I suggest you ask yourself why that is. In cities around the country, Jews have been posting the faces of the Hamas-held hostages. And in cities around the country, activists have been tearing those images down. Those plaintive images of babies are really harshing my pro-Hamas march vibe. In New York, protesters are desecrating their faces (obviously, that’s happening everywhere in England). The images of the kidnapped victims are being torn down by all sorts of people, like this Florida dentist. Welcome to the new Keep the Hostages movement. Why deprive Hamas of hostages? Do you know how high a terrorist’s cost of living is these days?
But my favorite Keep the Hostages activists are the two young women at NYU—Hafiza Khalique and Yazmeen Deyhimi—running around gleefully holding the ripped images of those hostages. Worth looking at some pics, because they’re just having so much fun doing it. But their pleasure is not what makes these two girls my favorite; it’s that Yazmeen was an intern at the—wait for it—Anti-Defamation League. Her apology: “I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times.”
It’s been doubly upsetting because my intern, Julia, is running around Stanford posting images of me and the words DEATH TO THE WAR CRIMINAL. Which is normal freedom of expression. She has a paper due on Monday on deconstruction and postcolonial analysis, but she’s doing “a performance project” for it and wants to meet in person, for whatever reason.
→ Biden addresses the nation: I’m a sucker for a wartime address. Biden, from the Oval Office on Thursday night: “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it,” he said, while calling for $105 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel. I know I have an anti-war faction in the comments section, so I’m sorry to all my peaceniks, but I was always honest with you guys about my love of Team America World Police.
One whoopsie is the White House posted unredacted faces of the special forces soldiers who are being deployed to get the Israeli hostages back. Yikes, sorry guys!
→ Griddle wars: A war has broken out between McDonald’s Israel and McDonald’s Oman—and McDonald’s Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Turkey. McDonald’s Israel gave free meals to Israelis involved in defending and rebuilding the country. In response, the McDonald’s franchise in Saudi Arabia released a statement: “In regard to the news that McDonald’s in Israel was donating meals. We affirm that it was an individual decision on their part. Neither global McDonald’s nor us nor any other country had a role or relationship with that decision, neither directly nor indirectly.” If nothing else, I learned a lot about how McDonald’s works. There used to be a theory: no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other. Now, not only is that not true, but the McDonald’s themselves are at war. I miss the Ron DeSantis Mouse Wars. Remember that? Those sweet, quaint culture wars! Why must McDonald’s get involved?
→ If Hamas can’t stay in the Four Seasons, they’ll be homeless: Hamas has set up headquarters in the Four Seasons in Qatar, and there’s some effort among House Republicans to oust them from it by pressuring Bill Gates, who owns a majority stake. Expect mainstream media to announce that anything rougher than 600 thread count sheets is a crime against humanity. Are those Hamas leaders sitting in the Four Seasons lobby? No, those are vulnerable unhoused people of terror.
→ “It was exhilarating”: Cornell history professor Russell Rickford led a Hamas pep rally, and he shouted to a cheering crowd about the attack on Israeli citizens: “It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if it weren’t exhilarating by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then you would not be human. I was exhilarated!” It’s become a cliché at this point, but the words are violence crowd is very comfortable with actual violence. But god, say the quiet part out loud much? (He’s since apologized for the good vibes but poor choice of words.)
Meanwhile, here’s a professor at University of California, Davis. (The school has taken down her faculty page and likely doubled her pay.)
Professor Decristo is trying to stir up literal violence against journalists (I might be in the top 500 on Jemma’s list, but Bar is definitely in the top 5, so if anyone wants to take her into your home that would be great). Jemma is trying to provoke people to do real-life harm to journalists and their children. She adds a knife, an ax, and three blood drops to make it really clear. (No one ever said terrorists were smart.) Do not hold your breath for one of the dozens of journalist dignity defense groups to speak up here. They’re camped out waiting for Trump to post a Truth so they can Stand Together Against Mean Trump Posts. Meanwhile, I’m going to email Professor Decristo to ask if her plan is to kill me tonight or tomorrow and what the vibe is exactly of knife, ax, blood blood blood.
Dr. Mika Tosca, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, wrote: “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement. . . . May they all rot in hell.” Lotta microaggressions there, right guys? Savages? That must’ve been in the orientation handbook, no?
And just in case you thought it was all professors, here’s New York city public school teacher Mohammad Jehad Ahmad, who posted the Hamas paraglider (of course, duh, trendy) and then wrote: “So-called ‘Israel’ is a white supremacist, settler-colony, that only exists through its ongoing dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide of the native Palestinian people.” Here’s the thing: academics often speak in metaphors. Analogies. You wouldn’t get it if you didn’t study gender. It’s called an illusion, my friend. When they say they support #HAMAS, it’s that they are for liberation of all oppressed peoples and also for the actual organization Hamas.
→ This public letter is private: Harvard students who signed a public letter blaming Israel for its own suffering and standing with Hamas are reeling after pro-Israel activists publicized those names, and future jobs subsequently disappeared. Headlines have blared: “Harvard students are doxxed.” See: when Harvard graduate students add their signatures to Open Letters with Calls to Action, they mean they are listed only if you, the great masses, like the call to action. In that case, We Signed This and Are Very Brave. However. If you do not like the call for that particular action, then you, the wider world, are not allowed to look at who signed a letter. Those names are not there.
→ Why won’t the Jews come to my Hamas-themed tech conference? Irish tech mogul Paddy Cosgrave hosts an annual conference called Web Summit, which just happens to be hosting an event in Qatar next year. Anyway, Paddy tweeted that Israel was committing “war crimes” and various other now-familiar phrases castigating the country for trying to get its hostages back. He then got very upset that prominent Jewish tech people were pulling out of his conference and posted: “I will not relent.” Eventually, he did indeed relent and issued a formal apology.
The biggest question for me: Why are all these prominent tech people going to Web Summit in the first place? Web Summit is lame and was always lame, and it has nothing to do with the new Hamas theme, which at least is interesting.
→ I think we found the disinfo: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar promoted an image of dead children wrapped in white shrouds with the text: CHILD GENOCIDE IN GAZA. It was, in fact, an image of an atrocity committed in Syria under Bashar al-Assad. Strangely, none of the fact-checkers at mainstream media companies jumped on that one. That’s because my favorite disinformation reporter—Ben Collins at NBC—was busy practicing disinformation, not debunking it. (Read this great Reason piece about our Ben, who, yes, won the Walter Cronkite Award in 2023.) Here is his colleague Brandy Zadrozny, lamenting that it’s simply Too Hard now: “I’m so angry about how impossible it is to tell what’s real or fake on this site anymore. There’s nowhere else to go so we all just stay here and act like anything is reliable.” It’s just, like, so hard not to write lies ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter. And there’s nowhere else to go. They are not allowed to leave the house and talk to anyone, you see. There’s nowhere else to go! I can only assume NBC has put all the disinformation reporters on house arrest.
Meanwhile, NPR featured Khaled Hroub, a professor at Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (of course), who said live on the show that Hamas maybe didn’t kill women and children at all. Just a thought. Yes, the bodycam footage Hamas terrorists took and the accounts of survivors, the photos, these are suspicious. NPR pulled the program from national distribution and later posted a correction online, which I’m sure those millions of live listeners all read.
→ Who would guess there are so many Hamas sympathizers in the government: Most Hamas sympathizers working in the U.S. government are too clever to post about it, but not Nejwa Ali.
Nejwa, who used to work for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, now works for the Department of Homeland Security. There, she helps determine who enters the U.S. as an “asylum seeker,” ostensibly vetting folks to protect us from letting in Hamas leaders. But that might be difficult, because she also really seems to love Hamas! Nejwa wrote, as the attacks were underway (and documented by The Daily Wire): “Fuck Israel, the government, and its military. Are you ready for your downfall?” In describing how she wakes up in the morning, Nejwa posted a video captioned: “Fuck Israel and any Jew that supports Israel” and “A nation that has nothing but Allah has everything it will ever need.” Of course, she also posted the Hamas paratrooper, yadda yadda. At first, the DHS stood by her (it was unclear to her colleagues and bosses what about “Fuck Jews” is offensive), but now she’s been suspended until we all get bored. If you subscribe to The FP, I hope all your immigration forms are in order because Nejwa will soon have some questions.
The Obamas’ podcast producer Misha Euceph posted on Instagram about the conflict, saying it’s pretty Islamaphobic who we call “civilians” and who we call “terrorists.” This is the argument that no Israeli or Jew counts as a “civilian,” meaning all are fair game to kill in the forever holy war.
And at the United Nations, someone posted from an official UN relief account that Hamas operatives stole the new humanitarian aid. The tweet was quickly deleted.
What you can’t delete is a drawing, specifically by David Mamet, our cartoonist in chief:
→ If a young person wants you dead, maybe they’re right? Have you considered that? Hamilton Nolan, an influential leftist writer whose essays I often love, published the clearest articulation of the Smart Person for Listening to Jew Haters that I’ve read. “Wisdom means listening to the angry youth,” he writes. He is taking down the obnoxious middle-aged moderates (blessedly me) who are balking at the cruel things being said about Jews and Israelis at leftist rallies. He calls these “small annoyances.”
An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.
Hmm. Young people sure have a lot of energy and none of that exhausting nuance. Maybe the world is black-and-white, after all. Often when I wake up I think “You know what, I have not listened enough to the indispensable purity of morality of those who went to prom last year.”
If a young person says you should die, have you considered that they are right?
Or listen to Malcolm Harris, an editor at The New Inquiry and TGIF’s favorite handsome redheaded communist, who came out to say that it was rogue elements in Hamas who did the bad stuff, not real Hamas. From Harris: “Has anyone changed their position on Hamas now that the leadership has condemned, rejected, and distanced themselves from the killing of civilians, the so-called ‘ISIS tactics’? I will say, if that really was autonomous elements then it is a good argument for some amount of party discipline, especially when guns are involved. I don’t think my feelings bear on the situation in any way, but I am relieved that Hamas is not pursuing a strategy of shockingly gruesome public displays of violence.”
Hamas is just like any disorganized group with lots of new employees: some will do kidnapping and torture and march through homes shooting Jewish children in attics. Hamas leadership clearly says: we only want Peace and Love (yes, in Arabic they’re technically chanting death to Jews, but I went to Columbia so I know how to translate that into American English, taking into account historical issues).
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